


The Hellfire Club

by AMarguerite



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 18th Century, Gen, Wing Grooming, aziraphale and crowley flail their way to victory, in that crowley invents the coffee shop, technically a coffeeshop au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:28:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: Circa 1718, Crowley overhears Gabriel announce Aziraphale’s to be promoted back to heaven. What’s a demon to do but thwart the plans of heaven?(Based on an interview I read where Neil Gaiman said he had to cut a scene in the 18th century with this particular scenario from episode three.)





	The Hellfire Club

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I’ve taken various historical liberties. The English coffee house was actually invented in 1662, for example, and the Hellfire Club, though established in 1718, did not actually deface the proof sheets of Bibles or discorporate angels. They did, however, have the Devil for their president.
> 
> I can’t remember where the wing-grooming-as-social-bonding idea came from, but I remember it being prevalent eons ago when everything was on livejournal.
> 
> It’s also... been a while since I read the book, so this is based more on the TV show.

London, 1718.

 

Aziraphale was opening a bookshop in Soho.

Crowley did not precisely understand why, and Aziraphale looked ruffled when pressed, so Crowley had assumed that some archangel or other had found Aziraphale’s stash of books, and demanded answers. Aziraphale was not a good liar when caught out— Crowley had seen the Bible Aziraphale amended, wherein his only defense to the Almighty against giving his flaming sword away had been, ‘oh I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, forget my own head next’— and could vividly picture Aziraphale’s angelic smile transforming into a sort of ethereal rictus. “Oh yes! The books! All the books. Religious texts. You know. To… check up on what the humans are thinking. And I’ve so many of them because, er— well, I thought I ought to change my cover story to fit the times! The really popular new trend with humans is reading, and reading books. So I thought, the best way to, um, to both keep up with the human trends in religious thought, and to, um, draw them to the side of good would be opening a bookshop!”

Crowley figured he’d been right when he saw the Archangel Gabriel, all wrong eye colors and over-toothy smiles, standing underneath the sign reading, “Mr. A. Fell, Purveyor of Books to the Gentry.” Crowley immediately darted into a side street. The last time Crowley had seen Gabriel, Gabriel had been tossing a friend of Crowley’s headfirst through several celestial spheres, straight into a pit of boiling sulfur. (1)

“I have exchanged some of your human money for this good and or service!” Gabriel trumpeted, holding a book upside down and above his head.

“Er yes, quite,” said Aziraphale, looking vaguely pained. Crowley wasn’t sure this was because of Gabriel’s pantomime of humanity, or the fact that a book was leaving the premises.

Gabriel leaned down to Aziraphale with a quiet, “Cheer up, your time on earth will soon be at an end. You’ll be back to heaven within the week.”

“I’m— I’m ever so.” Aziraphale faltered. “Grateful. For this promotion. But I cannot feel like— that is— I hardly deserve it.”

Crowley nearly dropped the bouquet he’d brought as a congratulations on opening present. (2)

“Modesty,” observed Gabriel. “A good virtue. But a better virtue is faith in the divine plan. And the divine plan requires you back up in heaven.”

“Right,” said Aziraphale, miserably.

“And it will be soon.” Gabriel clapped Aziraphale on the shoulder, hard enough to make Aziraphale stagger off-balance. “We put in the paperwork for it after your involvement with the King James Bible, and it’s now gone through. I’ve never seen a promotion go through so quickly!”

Aziraphale mumbled something, with only the word ‘ineffable’ being audible.

Gabriel raised his voice. “This completely ordinary transaction is now complete. Thank you, human shopkeeper.”

Aziraphale scrounged up a smile, or something that would pass for a smile before an angel who thought purple was an appropriate human eye color. Gabriel rounded the corner, tossed the book into the gutter, and popped out of the physical plane. The definitely-not-a-smile-to-human-eyes vanished and Aziraphale slumped inside the shop. The sign on the door turned from “open” to “closed.”

Aziraphale promoted? That couldn’t be. They’d been canceling each other out for centuries now. They’d reached a state of working equilibrium. And what was above a principality these days? Working in heaven obviously, but—

Crowley made a frustrated noise and moved out of his alleyway, strolling by the wide shop windows. Inside Aziraphale was puttering around his rows of books with an expression of tormented longing. Burbage hadn’t looked at the boy playing Juliet with such pangs of anguished love. Then Aziraphale turned and half jumped out of his earthly corporation. ‘Crowley?’ he mouthed.

Midway through an awkward wave of his bouquet, Crowley realized this was not at all the sort of thing the person he pretended to be would do. So he sauntered over to the front door, pausing only to pick up the abandoned book. The doors obligingly unlocked and swung open for him.

“Nice place,” said Crowley, looking around with feigned disinterest. “Lots of… books.”

“That’s the general idea behind it being a book shop,” replied Aziraphale. He spotted the book Crowley was holding and lit up. “Oh how kind, you brought me another.”

Crowley quickly miracled it clean before handing over _A True and Faithful Relation of what Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits_. “Seemed the right sort of present for a book store opening.”

Aziraphale turned the book around suspiciously. “Did you just steal this from an archangel?”

Crowley had a brief image of Aziraphale’s face if he said, ‘no, the archangel yeeted it into the gutter like it was a rebelling angel.’ “Weeeeelllll, you can’t blame me can you? I’m a demon, me. Must go about doing my demonic work. I’d probably get a special commendation for nicking a book of human prophecy from an archangel.”

“Mm.” Aziraphale gazed fondly at the cover of the book and wandered away with it, before placing it back on a shelf with all the tenderness of a mother tucking her newborn into its bassinet.

“Do they have books… upstairs?”

“There are some rooms above this—”

“No, I mean upstairs upstairs?”

Aziraphale paused, a fingertip balanced on the headcap of the book’s spine. “They have a lot of ledgers.”

Crowley didn’t know quite what to say. He wasn’t sure if he ought to admit to having eavesdropped, or if it was assumed. He busied himself miracling a Sevres vase of ostentatious stylishness out of a different shop window down the street, and arranged his bouquet and the vase on Aziraphale’s desk.

“They’re reassigning me,” Aziraphale said abruptly. “That’s why Gabriel was here. I— that is, it was— it’s a promotion, you know. Getting to leave the earth and go back to heaven.”

“Is it?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale’s shoulders slumped. “Yes.”

“Getting to go back to the flaming sword wielding, away from the book reading and food eating and play watching?”

“It’s a very great honor,” protested Aziraphale.

“You gave away your flaming sword what, less than two weeks after you got it?”

“I wish you wouldn’t bring that up,” Aziraphale fretted. “Michael’s expecting me to still have it, I know. All the other angels guarding Eden still have theirs, I saw them all practicing manouevers the last time I had to report to Head Office. And the quartermaster’s very strict about it— I mean, he has to be, the Almighty doesn’t go about making them and handing them out anymore.”

“Have you even used a non-flaming sword this millenia?”

Aziraphale looked sour. “My dear, times have changed. Head Office favors a less interventionist approach these days. Oh, those are lovely.” Aziraphale did not have the personal affinity Crowley did for plants, but sometimes pretended to, especially when it was easier than continuing on the conversation.

Crowley scowled. “Why now?”

“It’s—”

“—ineffable.”

“That’s the party line.” Aziraphale fussed with one of the roses. “Look, Crowley, you ought to be careful, now, the next principality of England might not be— well.” He fluttered his hands in the same fussy way he used to rearrange his wings, back when they were visible. “Practical.”

The thought of this was distressing, and even more so was the idea that the next principality wouldn’t be Aziraphale. They’d been together since, well, the Beginning. (3)

“You can’t be going,” said Crowley. “It’s… look, Aziraphale, the people here thought you were English before there was an England. You’re _made_  to be the principality of England.”

“Perhaps I was meant to for a certain period,” said Aziraphale, fretfully. “I don’t know the plan. They don’t consult me on these things, you know.” He looked about the store with an air so mournful and tragic Robert Burton would have rejected a sketch of him as too depressing to be included in _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. “I got in some nice cases of Madeira for the opening but I’m not feeling up to actually opening the shop. Would you care to have some?”

This was a better plan than Crowley’s, which was to keep trying to insist, in various ineffective ways, that Aziraphale couldn’t leave. Aziraphale’s stance was a primly angelic, “Heaven gave the order, so I will.” He would not be moved from it.

That was the difference between demons and angels, thought Crowley, lolling rakishly on a wooden stool that had suddenly found itself a silk-covered chaise-longue after the second bottle of Madeira. Angels get the order from the Almighty, or someone presumed to speak for the Almighty, and obey. Demons get the same and question.

Why? Why did it have to be? Crowley asked, not really expecting an answer, but got one anyhow.

“It’s partly your fault you know,” slurred Aziraphale. “After Henry VIII… new church ‘n all—”

“That one wasn’t me,” protested Crowley. “He went through all those wives on his own.”

“Those poor girls.” Aziraphale hiccuped. “Didn’t deserve it, the poor dears.”

“All him!”

“Well, you didn’t say so at the time, so I assumed—” He hiccuped. “Had to nudge things back to the side of good, my dear. You see? So I just… persuaded James I. Wouldn’t it be jolly to get the Bible translated? Save ever so many souls that way!”

“But have you?”

“Unclear.” Aziraphale leveled an unfocused gaze at Crowley. “Upstairs thought it would when they proposed the whole… thingy.”

“Promotion.”

“That.”

Crowley lolled about on the chaise-longue, trying to be louche, but looking, he thought, more like a snake that had forgotten why it had limbs and what it was supposed to do with them. “But if you’re doing such good, surely you’re needed on earth?”

“Not any more.” Aziraphale looked sadly into his empty glass. “Oh Crowley, they don’t drink _anything_ in heaven. I think even eating manna’s gone out of fashion.”

Crowley shot up, which was A Mistake. “You don’t want to go back! You— ooh, not good.” It was theoretically possible for a demon to be sick, but Crowley had staunchly avoided it since he got close in ancient Rome. “I have to sober up.”

“—promote up someone who’s just been a wheel of fire with a million eyes for the last several thousand years,” Aziraphale drunkenly complained, ignoring him. “And they won’t know how to eat anything let alone enjoy it, and really, lack of thumbs aside, they would be much better in an administrative role than I would be. I’m a field agent.”

“Exactly,” said Crowley. The empty bottles lolling about his feet suddenly snapped to attention and refilled. “You’re a field agent.”

“What if they don’t know what food is?” Aziraphale yelped, stumbling drunkenly to his feet. The empty bottles spun miraculously out of his way. He seized Crowley’s fancily embroidered lapels with a fearful desperation. “Crowley, what if the new principality doesn’t know how books work and _tries to eat them?_ You mustn’t, you _mustn’t_ let that happen.”

Crowley took him by the arms and steered him to the divan. “I promise I won’t let a flaming circle made of eyes eat your books. But listen. You’re a field agent for heaven— so along with all the blessings and the divine revelations and whatnot, you’ve got to thwart me, right? See me tempting, and you appear saying, ‘don’t do that, my dear.’”

“Well, yes,” said Aziraphale. “That’s the general idea.”

“Then we just have to show how good you are at thwarting me.”

“I’m not though,” said Aziraphale, helplessly. “Mostly we just let the humans do what they want.”

“What if I rile them up a bit?” asked Crowley. “Give them something really demonic to do— or just… showily demonic, something to catch Gabriel’s eye.”

Aziraphale blinked up at him. “I’m not following.”

“That’s because you’ve got half a case of Madeira in you,” said Crowley.

“Oh. Right.” Aziraphale screwed his face up in concentration. The bottles spinning by his desk spun upright, refilled themselves, and tidily corked themselves. “Yes. So you’re going to do something… showy, and I’ll… showily thwart you?”

“You can’t showily thwart me,” said Crowley patiently. “Not outright. We have to create a problem that’s going to last a long time. When they bring your replacement, you have to let him try and fail to thwart me, and then you fight me. You win the opening battle, but there’s still a war. That sort of thing.”

“That… could work.” Aziraphale considered this. “They’re coming back for me in a week. I’ll… you know, take the new fellow in, show him the ropes, and point you out to him.” Aziraphale met Crowley’s eyes with sudden worry. “But it’s such an awful risk for you, Crowley! What if he goes after you and you get discorporated or something?”

“As soon as I’ve got him incapacitated, you’ll have to rush in,” said Crowley. “And careful how you thwart! I’ve had this body since the Beginning. I’ve grown fond of it.” He patted Aziraphale’s shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. He was not much in the habit of reassuring anyone, human or otherwise. “Right. I’ve got half-a-dozen ideas. Let’s see what sticks.”

The next day Crowley invented the coffee house.

“I don’t know,” said Aziraphale, as they watched several bewigged gentlemen sitting down to read newspapers. “This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that gets Gabriel upset.”

“Addiction,” said Crowley, pointing at the coffee. “There’s caffeine in that. Speeds everyone up. And coffee’s from Turkey, so you’re drawing in all the renegades who dislike Christianity.”

Aziraphale’s attention had drifted to the sherbets on offer. “Oooh is that one violet flavored? Lovely.”

“Sugar, also technically addictive. Promotes gluttony.” Crowley spread his hands. “And everyone debating and making each other low-grade miserable, just by sharing the space! Everyone wants to be in it, quietly reading the paper, but some other bloke has the paper you want, and in the corner over there, two other blokes have gotten into a very loud debate about John Locke, and none of the servants will ever get your name right when calling out your order. Talk about a build up of wrath!”

“It’s a good effort,” Aziraphale said, through a mouthful of violet sherbet. “But I don’t think this is, er… it, my dear. The idea of getting a large number of people showily estranged from religion is, I think, the way to go, but….”

“Even showier,” mused Crowley.

Crowley then invented the Hellfire Club. It took a day or two after that to convince the Duke of Warton that there weren’t enough gentlemen’s clubs in London, because there were more gentlemen’s clubs in London than there were rainy days in England.

“The Hellfire Club?” Aziraphale hesitated, before returning to his previous task, paging lovingly through one of his favorite illuminated manuscripts. “It’s not exactly… subtle, is it?”

“Not really, no,” Crowley admitted. “But you said showy, and this is showy. I got them to elect the devil as president.”

That was enough to get Aziraphale to look up. “What, the Adversary himself?”

“No, it’s a rhetorical gesture.” The chaise-longue conveniently appeared right beside Aziraphale’s counter. Crowley sank back onto it with a sigh. “But you don’t know that for certain. Better investigate. Take the new principality with you, to show him how it’s done.”

“And your side won’t, er… I mean, they won’t see anything amiss in it?”

“What, a little fashionable Satan worship? Nah, sort of thing that gilds the lily of any good report.” Crowley stretched his arms out before folding them behind his head.

“It’s not really your style, that’s all. Downstairs won’t, er… you know….”

“I can’t try something new after five or six thousand years?”

Aziraphale would have ruffled his wings, in the old days, but they’d both been hiding them for too long. Now he just clasped his hands together in front of his waistcoat, with a look of faintly, saintly, and almost annoying angelic encouragement. “Oh no, of course you can. That’s, well. The humans are always changing, we have to change with them to have any influence.”

“Hence the bookshop.”

Aziraphale hesitated. “Yes. Hence the bookshop.”

Crowley lowered his sunglasses and took in the deserted aisles, crammed all with rare volumes, and the closed sign on the door. “I know you’re new at this, angel, but usually you need to… actually open the shop. If you want people to buy your books.”

“Oh yes. Buy the books.” Aziraphale gave a nervous sort of titter. “Humans… walking away with all my Shakespeare quartos. Keeping them in their overlit libraries and breaking the spines to show off the more famous pages to their friends and getting them rebound and chopping down the margins outrageously. Yes. That.”

Crowley raised his eyebrows.

“Humans are very good at making things,” said Aziraphale. “But they aren’t very good at preserving them. I just want to make sure that the books go to the _right_ sort of people. But we’re getting distracted. I’m not… entirely sure how I’m to thwart a gentleman’s club who are only rhetorically interested in Satan.”

“Well, you just so happen to sell improving and moralistic books to the gentry….”

Aziraphale beamed at him. “Oh Crowley, you are a marvel.”

“I know how you His— or Her, rather— divine wonders do perform,” said Crowley. “I have known you since the Beginning, after all.”

“It really has been you and me most of the time, hasn’t it?” Aziraphale closed the manuscript carefully. “The humans we know don’t last very long, the poor things, and Head Office doesn’t check in very often.”

“It’ll still be the two of us, angel,” said Crowley. “I’m going to bring the club over this Sunday to write rude words on the proof sheets for the Bible your neighbors two doors down are printing. You can point them out, I’ll kick dust into your newly incorporated replacement’s lone set of eyes, and then we’ll have to grapple a bit.”

“Really, Crowley, I—”

“Don’t thank me,” Crowley said quickly. “This is just me doing my job, and just you doing your job, right?”

“Right.” Aziraphale still looked at him with a soft, fond expression, but as soon as he caught Crowley looking at him, went off to shelve the manuscript. “When you think we’ve done enough grappling, can you shout something about how I’ve thwarted you and just… pop off for a bit?”

“Of course. Dust to the eyes, bit of a grapple, buggering off. A great plan, if I do say so myself.”

Sunday came. The members of the Hellfire Club decided Crowley’s plan was a splendid idea and began writing down logical inconsistencies, translation errors, and philosophical disputations in the margins of all the proofs, in truly the nerdiest vandalism Crowley had ever witnessed. Then, right on time, Aziraphale came out of his bookshop, with the familiar figure of Gabriel, and a finely dressed person in beige that Crowley had never seen before.

“You devils!” exclaimed Aziraphale. “Defacing the word of the Lord!”

The Hellfire Club was already quite drunk. They ran gigglingly off to their waiting carriages. Several of the drunker members of the Hellfire Club decided that it would be great fun to drive their own carriages through the streets of London, even though none of them knew how to drive. Of course they insisted Lord Crowley take his turn, too.

This was not a great idea.

Though most humans could overlook the more snake-like aspects of Crowley’s corporation, horses could not. They sensed something fanged and venomous at their backs and bolted.

Aziraphale pointed. “Behold, the demon Crow— oh no, Sandalphon, you don’t want to behold him that closely!”

Crowley tossed the reins to Lord Warton, and jumped out of the moving carriage. He was well prepared to thence kick dust into the new field agent’s eyes but the new field agent no longer had eyes.

In fact, the new field no longer had a body.

It had been trampled under the carriage and the bits remaining were now floating back to heaven.

“You’ve discorporated Sandalphon!” cried Gabriel.

Crowley hadn’t meant to, he was just bad with horses. Still, he was in the habit of taking credit for things that he hadn’t technically done, so after making sure no humans would see any of this, he whipped off his tinted glasses (imported very expensively from China) and tasted the air with his tongue in a triumphant and vaguely alarming sort of way. “Ha ha! ’Tis I, the evil demon Crowley! The forces of good shall never triumph against me!”

“Oh you… bad… demon,” Aziraphale improvised, rather more flustered than commanding. He gave the impression that if he had to smite anyone, he would apologize for the terrible inconvenience beforehand.

“It cannot be my nemesis, the angel Aziraphale!” Crowley exclaimed, trying to make Aziraphale seem a little more competent. “He who has thwarted so many of my evil plans! Curses, I had founded this Hellfire Club in celebration, when I heard he was to be recalled to heaven!”

“Indeed, ‘tis I! Begone foul fiend!”

“Make me!”

To say “Aziraphale lunged forward” would have been lying on a scale even Crowley couldn’t stomach. Aziraphale anxiously approached Crowley, as if wishing to point out to a stranger that they had spinach in their teeth.

“Oh come on,” hissed Crowley, seizing Aziraphale around the waist. “Make it look convincing!”

Aziraphale _yelped_.

“And the Almighty put _you_ on flaming sword duty?” muttered Crowley, trying to grapple convincingly.

“I never used the thing!” Aziraphale hissed back. He raised his voice. “How dare you discorporate Sandalphon!” He then flailed about enough to make them fall over.

They attempted to wrestle.

It was not good.

Particularly since Aziraphale got startled when Crowley rolled on top of him, and defensively sprouted wings.

“Do you ever groom those?” Crowley muttered, trying to avoid being beaten with them. “Just disgraceful, you’ve got loose feathers sticking out everywhere—”

The disorder offended him— or at least that’s what he told himself (4)—and he pulled out a loose feather.

“Aziraphale, look out, he’s going for the wings!” wailed Gabriel.

Aziraphale shook out his wings, causing a few more loose feathers to fall out.

Gabriel screamed.

Crowley let his wings sprout himself. This was also a bad idea. He had only manifested them these days to air them out and groom them. Not using them for so long had made it hard to regain his balance, and harder still to untangle himself from Aziraphale.

“Move your elbow— other elbow—“

“Ow!”

“Careful of my wing,” hissed Crowley.

“Sorry,” muttered Aziarpahle. “It’s just— oh bother, I’ll move then.”

This freed them both. Crowley awkwardly rolled to his feet and took off at a run down the street, wings beating furiously.

“Come back here, you!” Aziraphale cried.

“You may have won the battle,” said Crowley, flying off facing backwards, “but I shall win the war! You may have thwarted all my other evil plots but you shall not defeat my Hellfire Club! This time, I shall prevail!”

With that Crowley zoomed back to his set of rooms, on trendy Bond Street. He let a day pass and then returned to the bookshop.

The sign no longer read “Closed.” It now had a handwritten sheet of paper, with a byzantine list of open hours that meant, effectively, that the shop never had been and never would be open. Crowley wanted to laugh with relief.

The doors majestically parted for him, when he snapped his fingers.

Aziraphale stood in a perfect beam of light at the center of the bookshop, holding a cup of tea and gazing about himself with affection. The look didn’t change or shift when he spotted Crowley. “Oh my dear, do come in! It worked!”

“I can see that,” said Crowley, feeling happier than he had since seeing Gabriel again. He snapped his fingers. The doors closed and locked behind him. “You’re still a principality?”

“Oh yes!” Aziraphale beamed at him. “Clearly you were going to take advantage of my absence to drag all England to hell. And I’m the only one clever enough to thwart your evil plots, you wily old serpent. Care for a cuppa?”

“Love one.”

Aziraphale led him to the backroom. He had rather a nice tea service set up. Hardly fashionable, and everything could use a good polish, but the nibbles were excellent.

“It really was marvelous,” said Aziraphale, pouring out second cups for them both. “Gabriel agreed with my plan, to stay and get the Hellfire Club hooked on reading books instead of acts of erudite vandalism, and said I couldn’t be spared from here, clearly. He was sorry but I said I would go where commanded and he commanded me to stay. So…”

“So you’re staying,” Crowley said with relief. “You’re in England.”

Aziraphale handed Crowley a cup of tea made just as Crowley liked it. “For the foreseeable future.”

Crowley sank into his chair.

“I suppose,” said Aziraphale nonchalantly, “I ought to thank you. It... was different, what you did. I mean, different from doing a miracle for me because you were going to Manchester anyhow.”

“Do you know how much work it would be, breaking in another operative?” Crowley asked.

He asked it carefully.

Aziraphale could be easily startled. Crowley could not remember if the other angels also reacted like cats suddenly spotting a cucumber when seeing anything that didn’t align with their understanding of the universe, or made them question their orders. But questioning had been enough to get you cast out of heaven, in the old days— it had been for Crowley. That and unwisely deciding to go over to Lucifer and the boys and say, “I’m bored, what are you doing?” on the day they decided “well, there’s nothing else on, let’s rebel against God.” It made sense that, since then, all the other angels clung to heavenly orders with a terrified obedience.

”Another angel,” said Crowley, “wouldn’t be as reasonable as you.”

“Reasonable,” echoed Aziraphale, cautiously.

“Amenable to an arrangement like ours.”

Aziraphale nodded. Still cautiously.

Crowley, sensing, with a skill honed from years of temptation, that Aziraphale was about to bolt in a flurry of pursed lips and blustering comments about the time, deftly diffused the tension with a joke. “They _certainly_ wouldn’t be alive to the subtle but important distinction between a 1698 and a 1697 Chateau Lafite.”

Under this was the unspoken idea: ‘I wouldn’t be friends with another angel.’ And buried, even farther under this, at the level where God had placed a bunch of dinosaur bones as a practical joke, ‘I would miss you, my best friend.’ And then, in the molten core of the earth, smothered by magma, the glowing certainty, ‘I love you.’

“They might not even like wine,” said Crowley, pathetically.

“Probably not,” said Aziraphale. “Some of the other principalities do, from what I hear, but they never let us field operatives meet. I’ve never had a chance to ask in… well, person, for lack of a better phrase. If they were thinking of elevating a virtue or someone, then that would be straight out.”

“Do you really not see anyone but Head Office?”

Aziraphale nodded. “It’s why my wings looked such a fright. I checked in with them oh… a decade ago? But they’ve only wanted reports since. And Gabriel popped in so briefly we didn’t have time to groom. Well, except he did help yesterday, after Sandalphon got discorporated. He needed the reassurance after that.” Aziraphale glanced behind him. Two bookshelves jumped back and Aziraphale sprouted his wings. He brought forward one to examine the pinion feathers. “But, um….”

“Idea man, rather than detail man, the archangel Gabriel,” suggested Crowley. Something strangely warm and bright seemed to have settled under his breastbone, as if his tea had gotten stuck on the way down. Without really thinking about it, he stood and moved behind Aziraphale.

“Oh gosh yes. Did you hear what a hash he made of the Annunciation?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“Well, my dear—” Aziraphale cut himself off, and glanced over his shoulder.

“Spread this one first,” said Crowley, laying a fingertip, lightly, on the shoulder joint of Aziraphale’s right wing.

Aziraphale did at once. “Well, I got this from Raphael, so it’s second hand, but it’s so _Gabriel_ I think it must be true. Mary’s just visiting her cousin Elizabeth, who’s expecting John the Baptist. Young girl, very sheltered. Then in sweeps Gabriel and says, not hello or anything like that, but congratulations you’re going to have the son of God. Ta, thanks ever so, and then he just turns to go.”

“No!” Crowley exclaimed, delighted. The down of Aziraphale’s scapulars was wonderfully soft. He couldn’t remember feeling anything as soft in several millennia.

“He did! The poor thing exclaims that it’s not possible, she’s a virgin—”

“What, she can’t make a copy of herself?”

Aziraphale looked over his shoulder reproachfully. “Humans are not _snakes_ , my dear, you need two of them.”

Crowley was shocked to discover how much he had missed this, the calming routine of this. He dragged it out as long as he could, airing out each feather individually, smoothing each one carefully into place. When he ran out of things to do, Crowley reluctantly moved away.

Aziraphale reached out and touched his sleeve. “I think I disordered your secondary coverts when we were grappling.”

“You didn’t,” said Crowley.

“Are you sure?”

Crowley glared the tea table away and unfurled his wings. “Very sure.”

“Let me look?”

Crowley hesitated, but then turned and sat on the floor by Aziraphale’s feet.

Aziraphale carefully fluffed up and then smoothed down each feather, in a way that felt so remarkably soothing Crowley brought his arms to his knees and let his head loll on them. He hadn’t trusted anyone like this since before—

Well. Since before the Fall. Back when this was an easy, everyday occurrence. Flopping down on a cloud, spreading a wing, gossiping idly about the archangels. He’d almost forgotten this. If he had only met Aziraphale before the beginning, hadn’t sought out the flash bastards....

“Oh I’m sorry, did I…?” Aziraphale pulled away slightly.

“What?”

“You’re, um… I didn’t hurt you, pulling out that feather? It was done for, I’m afraid.”

“Just a twinge,” lied Crowley. “It feels much better now, angel.”

 

  1. That friend had been Crowley.

  2. And as a warning to certain plants of his that were not blooming as fully or as colorfully as they ought.

  3. They hadn’t known each other in Heaven, before the Fall, but Crowley tried very hard to pretend that there had been no time before the Fall. Aziraphale no longer brought up any point in time before Eden, after one very soused fight over it in the 14th century.

  4. Angels did not groom their own wings. They groomed each others’, as a form of bonding similar to the way teenage girls are moved, by mysterious social forces, to braid each others’ hair at sleepovers. For an angel to groom his own wings was to delcare that he had no friends.





End file.
